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Chapter Six:
A Story to Stand On: Creating a Story of the Self
This material is edited from a much longer chapter with hopes it will intrigue you to discover the fullness of the book, Storycatcher, Making Sense of our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin. Each chapter is carried by a tale about people, family, or community, intertwined with philosophical and practical instruction about the nature of story, how it works and how we can practice it in our lives. The Storycatcher reading group guidelines show the list of questions that appears at the end of each chapter.
In the first half of this book, I invited you into my story in hope that you would find your own story mirrored there. For the second half of this book, I've invited other voices to carry the narrative...
The self-story is the narrative voice in the stream of consciousness that runs babbling along the edge of our awareness. Minute by minute this narrative defines who we are and what we are capable, or not capable, of doing. It speaks a lot of nonsense, and it whispers our greatest truths — all jumbled together . One of our primary internal tasks is to work with this narrative until the self-story supports our abilities to grow, to fulfill our promise to the world, to keep our commitments to other people. The self-story is the story we stand on.
The self-story is the most influential story of our lives, yet it is often the one we are least aware of, because it speaks to us largely through influence. Influence is the capacity of something — a person, event, or remark — to act as a compelling force on our beliefs, behaviors, actions, and opinions of ourselves and others, whether or not we are aware of it. Influence is the lens that drops between our story and reality.
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Marianne Knuth, Servant Leader and Shining Light
Starting in the 1950s, a Swiss doll-maker named Sasha Morgenthaler decided to make a universal child's doll by pouring together all the skin colors of the world and making all her dolls one skin tone. Combining every pigmentation from the blue-black skin of African and Indian peoples to the alabaster paleness of Nordic Europe, and all the yellows and browns and freckles in between, the bodies of her dolls are a delicate coffee latté — and so is Marianne Knuth. She is the color of the world poured together, and the world is her home.
She's not famous, not published, not rich, but Marianne so fully inhabits herself I asked her if she'd share her story and allow me to listen through the ear in the heart for the ways she has — in just over thirty years — so thoroughly assembled an enduring sense of self. Shyly, bravely, she said yes.
...
"My family was middle class when we lived in Denmark, and also later in Africa ... My favorite hobby was horse riding, and I shared a pony with another girl so I could ride three times a week. I loved the group Abba, and John Travolta in the movie Grease. I think I was a pretty typical young girl growing up just outside Copenhagen. My mother worked for a shipping company and my father worked as a librarian."
With Marianne's gracious permission, we can watch her extraordinary ability to work with her self-story, and through empathy and vicariousness, we can transfer these lessons into our own life stories. ... I have identified four activities required to work with self-story: linking, editing, disorienting, and revisioning.
 ... Marianne's choices from her Danish childhood had laid an essentially self-affirming foundation in her, but (her return to) Zimbabwe's intensified racial environment raised new challenges. "Racism is such a huge part of the history in Africa. If you took a helicopter and flew over my school, you would have seen little separate clusters of white children, black children, Indian children, and colored children. To say I am colored, in Africa, means very specifically that I am mixed race. Some of my friends had been colored for several generations, with mixed-race grandparents and parents marrying amongst themselves; I was, of course, the first generation.
"There were four little girls who were my friends, two colored, one black, one white. Something happened to us one day: we got in a big disagreement focused on the black girl and one of my colored friends made the remark, 'This just proves my mother was right — you can never trust blacks.' I was totally shocked that she didn't see herself as part black, that she was prejudiced about her own bloodline. ... I didn't have a way to think through the sociology; I was just shocked at the racism. So I began to see that there was something significant about being biracial. Race was all around me. I could look in the mirror. I knew people wanted race to apply to me, but I chose to disregard color. I am who I am, regardless of my color. I will not allow myself to be placed in the same boxes that everyone places everyone else in."
This awareness is Marianne editing.
...
The gate to any new period of growth or maturity in our lives requires a period of discomfort and disorientation. Out of this experience we eventually create a more deeply integrated story.
Whenever we find ourselves in a period of disorientation we can gain perspective by viewing our crisis as though it is a key turning point in the plot of a novel — after all, our life is a story, and stories follow certain structures. ... Plot is set in motion by some detonating event that discombobulates us, shakes up the status quo, and sets us off on the journey. When this happens in real life we may try to reestablish our former life, but eventually we realize that is impossible. Plot carries us forward into new territory; there is no going back. The only resolution is to reorient our lives so that we can integrate this experience into who we are.
...
 Marianne continues: "Every summer I went home to Zimbabwe and became more and more aware of the discrepancy between what I was told to value and what I was told to pity. The social contrast played out very personally for me, but I didn't have any idea how to reconcile it. I held my mother's advice close to heart, graduated and went straight into university, to business school. As a business major, I was learning about micro- and macroeconomics, statistics, accounting, and so on. In the best pedagogical style, I was taught to see humanity as Homo economicus, a species simply interested in maximizing his own profit and material wealth. The complex world of human organizing was summarized into people expressing their well-being through financial figures. I never stopped questioning: my Zimbabwean grandparents made it very clear that there were other definitions of wealth. I was looking for something idealistic to emerge in my European world.
"...If I could integrate the materialistic, mechanistic view of mankind I was being taught in school, with the humanistic, biologic living system that was Africa in my blood, I could make a world in which to hold myself."
Here comes Marianne's vision rising out of her period of disorientation. ... To make a world that can hold us is a universal longing. And we start by organizing a story that can hold us.
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Tell Me This Story: Your Opportunity to
Share Your Story
We each create a story of the self that begins with our birth story, and then continues with what we remember, speak, and write about our own lives. We decide throughout this process what we want our lives to include and what kind of a legacy we want to leave behind, and then we are challenged to act on this story — to become who we say we are.
In those moments when you are listening to the story of yourself, what do you reclaim?
Let's start there.
Tell me that story.
Click here to respond to this question with a story from your own life >>
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